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CBC
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick
Nearly 20 years after her breakout memoir, Fun Home, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is still unearthing new truths about that period of her life. But this time, she's taking a look at her personal story through fiction, with her new comic novel, Spent. In Spent, she explores the life of a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, who grapples with her complicated relationship with capitalism, community and activism after the success of her memoir and its subsequent TV adaptation. "When I was younger, I did lead a more communal life," Bechdel said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I lived in a communal house. I went out and did political activities and was involved in my community. Over time, I really stopped doing that — and it's a bunch of factors. Part of it's getting older, part of it is being in a relationship, but a big part of it was that I was living very much on the edge until I was in my 40s, until Fun Home came out, and slowly saved my financial bacon." "Then I started making a lot of money, which was a very weird experience for someone who had formed their sense of self as an outsider and especially as a poor outsider." Bechdel, who is also known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and books Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, joined Roach to revisit her debut memoir and how it shaped her return to fiction. Mattea Roach: You published your memoir, Fun Home, almost 20 years ago when you were 45. Now you're in your 60s. How has your relationship with the text evolved over the past nearly two decades? Alison Bechdel: It's funny to have this thing, this record of my life that is unchanging, like it's cast in stone. Even though I have found out lots of interesting information about various people or scenes in the book that would change the story if I were to write it now, it's done. This is the record and it's very odd to have to be constantly talking about it. The book was published almost 20 years ago, but I'm still talking about it as if it's a new thing to people. So that's a funny activity to get one's head around. How did it come about that you learned new information about some of the stuff that's depicted in the book? Was it a situation where people you knew read the book and said that's not actually how it was? I'll tell you one example of that, which is that I learned from my mother's best friend, that on the day that my father died, she had decided to not divorce him. Wow. Your dad died when he was hit by a truck and that was two weeks after your mom had asked for a divorce. And then there's some significant suggestion that it might have actually been intentional on his part. In this tumultuous time around between when I came out to my parents and when he died, which was just a couple of months, my mother had asked him for a divorce. And now I find out that she had been going to call that off. It just just casts her whole story into this really different light. It was already quite a tragic story, but now it's even worse, you know? Fun Home was made into this Broadway musical in 2015 and it won five Tonys. It's a very different work despite being adapted from your memoir. How did it feel to hand over a project that was so personal to be adopted for another medium? I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I had sort of sidestepped an offer to option it for a film by asking for more money than they were willing to pay me. Which was a great relief. But then this offer came up for a musical and I didn't really have a connection to musicals. I've seen musicals, but I'm not like a big musical person. Somehow it seemed like it was different enough that I wouldn't mind if someone made a really bad musical out of my book — and the way that I would mind if it were a really bad film adaptation. I don't know what I was thinking now, but fortunately, that didn't happen. The people who made it did a very good job. It's a really good adaptation, but I always sort of think, "Wow, that was lucky." In my new book Spent, I explore what it would be like to really lose control of a creative project. Why did you want to explore this alternate path that you're grateful, in your real life, to not have gone down? Well, partly because once you become a writer in this world, everyone expects you to then somehow do something for TV or the great triumph is to get your book turned into a TV show and that just always strikes me as funny. Why can't we just make comic books that are comic books? I guess, obviously, because you make more money, but it's also just a cultural phenomenon. You know that if you're a writer, you have to grapple with this. Why did you want to revisit these characters from your weekly comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For who are now in late middle-age but are still living together in a communal housing situation? This book, Spent, was going to be another memoir. That's what I started doing after my comic strip. I retired the comic strip and began writing books about my life. And I thought that's what I was going to do forever because I really liked writing about actual life. Occasionally, someone would ask me, do you ever think you'll do fiction again? And I would just go blank. Fiction? How do you do that? And I couldn't even remember that I had actually done this fictional comic strip. But I realized early on in the work for this book that doing it as a memoir was going to be really boring. I just somehow didn't want to write about my actual life or actually read Marx or all the things I would have to do to intelligently discuss money or capitalism. In the moment that I threw that idea away, this other idea came in. What would really be funny is if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a book about money and then it just all sort of sprang to life — and in that new vision, there were my old comic strip characters who were going to be my friends. It just was one of those lovely moments when something just comes into your mind fully formed, which hardly ever happens to me.
Globe and Mail
30-05-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Alberta Insider: New fronts in the culture wars
Good morning. Alberta is no stranger to some of the culture wars that have been fought in the United States and abroad in recent years. This week, two new fronts were opened in the province. First, on Monday, the Alberta government announced plans to hold public consultations so it can set new regulations for school libraries, creating rules around books that the province deems age-inappropriate because of what it qualifies as sexually explicit content. 'School libraries spark imagination and foster a lifelong love of learning within our children,' Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides told reporters in Calgary. 'Yet, unfortunately, through investigations conducted by my office, we have found books in K-12 schools that show extremely age-inappropriate content.' The province said it found 'multiple books with explicit sexual content' as part of an investigation conducted by Nicolaides's office. Only four examples were provided on Monday, each of which are graphic novels and depict LGBTQ or coming-of-age subjects: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Blankets by Craig Thompson and Flamer by Mike Curato. The Globe's Temur Durrani reached out to the four authors, who all said they were not consulted after their books were flagged and that the content is being taken out of context. Thompson, an Oregon-based graphic novelist, said his book is a coming-of-age autobiography based on his own childhood in an evangelical Christian family. Curato, a Massachusetts-based illustrator, also defended his work. 'Protecting the right to read is protecting the right to exist,' he told The Globe. The issue of determining what books are age appropriate has led to numerous political disputes and legal challenges. The fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court last month, when a children's picture book by a Vancouver Island author about a puppy at a Pride parade was among several works at the centre of a court challenge over whether parents have the constitutional right to opt their children out of lessons involving works with LGBTQ characters. Alberta's new policies, when implemented, will apply to public, separate, francophone, charter and independent schools. The second battle of the week came on Wednesday, when the Canadian Medical Association filed a constitutional challenge alongside three Alberta doctors against the province's legislation that limits access to medical treatment for transgender youth. The CMA says it is compelled to step in to guard the relationship between patients, doctors and families in making treatment decisions. Alberta's Bill 26, which became law last December, prohibits doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for those under 16. It also bans doctors from performing gender-reassignment surgeries on minors (those under 18) – an already rare occurrence in the province. CMA president Joss Reimer said the law has created a 'moral crisis' for physicians, saying an 'ideological influence' does not help the patient. 'When governments get involved and start restricting medical decisions, that means that doctors are then put into a position where they have to choose between following their ethical standards, following what they feel is best for their patients or following the law,' Dr. Reimer told The Globe. At the time of the filing, the Alberta government had not commented on the CMA's legal challenge. The United Conservative government has previously declined to comment on legal action launched against the bill last year by advocacy groups Egale Canada and Skipping Stone Foundation, citing it was before the courts. This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you're reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Spent by Alison Bechdel review – the graphic novelist faces up to midlife
Alison Bechdel emerged in the 1980s with Dykes to Watch Out For, a groundbreaking weekly strip that featured a group of mostly lesbian friends. Since then, her acclaimed graphic novels have focused mainly on herself and her family. Fun Home in 2006 (exploring her closeted, funeral-director father's suicide and her coming out) was followed by Are You My Mother? (psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (her compulsive exercising, from karate and crunches to snowshoeing). These three erudite, pensive and observant works spend most of their time looking back. Where the modern Bechdel is present, she is mostly sketching, editing and narrating her past, and contemplating how everyone from Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf to paediatrician Donald Winnicott can help her shed light on it. In Spent, by contrast, we meet an Alison Bechdel who lives largely in the present. She writes and draws in rural Vermont, campaigns for progressive causes and hangs out with her friends and her wife, Holly. Yet this book-Alison is not quite the real Bechdel. In Spent, Alison's father was a taxidermist, not a mortician; Bechdel's two brothers have been replaced by a Maga-loving sister. In our world, Fun Home has been made into a Tony-winning musical and is being (slowly) developed into a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The equivalent in Spent is Death and Taxidermy, a graphic memoir whose very loose TV adaptation (dragons and cannibalism feature, alongside Aubrey Plaza and Benedict Cumberbatch) is on to its third season. The book-Alison has mixed feelings about its success, but the royalties help fund the pygmy goat sanctuary she runs with Holly, and give her the leeway to prevaricate as she plans a new work: $um, an accounting of money and her life, with a little help from Karl Marx. Progress is slow: headlines about Trump's first term blare from her device screens, the goats are grabbing every opportunity to breed, Holly is increasingly keen to film everything for her social feeds and Covid has the world in its grip. America is atomised, with 'a zillion streaming options with six people tuned into each of them', Alison says. 'No wonder the country's a mess.' Yet Spent is anything but a book about a writer's lonely lot. Alison's liberal community bustles with gossip and life. There are vets to befriend, new neighbours to meet, anticolonial Thanksgiving dinners to attend and speeches to give against book banning. Just down the road, her friends Ginger, Lois, Sparrow and Stuart share a house, this quartet – in another metafictional twist – having wandered over from the panels of Dykes to Watch Out For. Spent, then, feels less like a fictionalised autobiography and more a gathering of threads from Bechdel's life and work, a celebration of and a rumination on where she has landed in late middle age, and how some of her fictional creations might live alongside her. That doesn't mean first-time readers won't enjoy it. Bechdel's acutely observant line drawings – here enriched with warm colour by the real-life Holly – lend themselves wonderfully to the alternately comfortable, intimate and awkward interactions of her cast as they gather around tamari-roasted turnips and fennel flambé to shoot the breeze. There's always been a spark to Bechdel's work, despite its often serious themes, and writing about herself from a greater fictional distance seems to have given her more room to have fun. Dramas and mishaps unspool with a lightly comic charm that belies the darkness in the world outside, from Alison's optimistic side-hustle (she pitches a reality TV show based on ethical living) to Sparrow and Stuart's experiment as a throuple with old friend Naomi (a vegan purple dildo is delivered with a wink by a FedEx driver). Yet it's longtime fans who will get the most from Spent. There's a real joy to seeing characters return, their shapes a little baggier, their hair greyer, but their spirits the same. If you've treasured sharing Bechdel's days spent hunched over her diary as a pale and anxious child, or cycling up the Adirondacks as a fitness-mad thirtysomething, it's poignant to meet an Alison whose fierce self-analysis has mellowed a little. There's a pathos, too, in seeing once-young radicals engage with a younger generation, in the form of Sparrow and Stuart's daughter JR, who has returned to Vermont after the collapse of her polycule. Spent isn't perfect. At times Alison's world, with its 'Shmetflix' and 'Schmamazon' and 'sage and sawdust' gluten-free stuffing, seems broad pastiche. There are stretches where you feel like you're watching comfortably off semi-retirees cosplaying as agricultural workers. Yet while Spent may lack some of the raw power of Bechdel's earlier work, this wise and playful tale has deep roots. On a flight back from pitching half-interested streaming networks about her reality TV show Alison soars over the 'intriguingly wrinkled landscape of the south-west', asks for a pencil and starts drawing over a TV script, the 'rasp of graphite on paper … opening the flat page into another dimension'. It's a neat epiphany and a lovely summary of the craft of comics, and it feels thoroughly earned. By the end of Spent, Alison has learned that she can't do everything, but that perhaps doing something – and being in the moment with people you love – is enough. It's an almost cosy conclusion, undercut by what we know but the book-Alison does not: that Trump will return, not long after her account has finished. Will Alison keep her newfound joie de vivre? I hope we get to find out. Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Alison Bechdel Is Finally at Peace Mixing Fiction and Memoir
Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of the long-running alt-weekly comic strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For,' then jumped to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs 'Fun Home' and 'Are You My Mother?' Her new book, 'Spent,' is a graphic novel — but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this week's podcast. 'Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,' Bechdel says. 'I just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. It's all right there. It's served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, You're able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, don't you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you can't. You've got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring. Anyway, after a while, I started to see the merits of fiction — there's stuff you can do that you can't when you're trying to stick to absolute fact. So this was just a very fun, liberatory exercise. Honestly, I feel a little confused myself about what's true and what's not true in the book.' We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
These Boomer Radicals in Vermont Just Want to Be ‘Good Progressives'
Alison Bechdel, the protagonist of 'Spent,' is a sellout. She is not exactly the same person as Alison Bechdel, the author of 'Spent,' whose previous books include the graphic memoir 'Fun Home,' an adroit reflection on her relationship with her mortician father. But there are similarities. The fictional Alison also wrote a memoir about her secretive father who embalms dead bodies, but hers is called 'Death and Taxidermy' — which should give you an idea of this book's tone (silly) and its aim (introspection). Our heroines are Alison and her wife, a sunny sculptor named Holly (who resembles the author's own wife, Holly Rae Taylor, an artist who did the coloring on 'Spent'). Complicating their life on a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont is a crew of old friends who live nearby, several of them in the same house. There's Stuart, the sweetly irritating middle-aged man who wears a utility kilt and a Bernie Sanders T-shirt; his stoic wife, Sparrow; their kid, J.R., who drops out of Oberlin after getting disillusioned with their asexual polycule; everyone's pal Lois, who acts as a sort of tour guide to other people's sexual hangups and fetishes; and so on. Though it's the lightest of comedies, the book's biggest question is a laudably difficult one: Can you be a good progressive if you're a safe and privileged member of the upper middle class in a society tainted by oppression and selfishness? It's an urgent question for Alison: After devoting years to her syndicated, minimally lucrative comic strip 'Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For,' she's sold the rights to a prestige TV series based on 'Death and Taxidermy' that's now streaming on 'Schmamazon.' She and her friends watch with mounting horror as the showrunner, Çedilla Ümlaut (I laughed), turns Alison's most personal work into provocative, sophomoric nonsense. She's being exploited, but she's also being paid generously. Charting the group's adventures in leftist activism, polyamory and animal husbandry, Bechdel pulls off a delicate balancing act. It would be easy to make excuses for these lovable but almost transcendently annoying people preoccupied with their own comfortable lifestyle, or to nastily mock them. Bechdel does neither: Her genuine affection for her characters — with the possible exception of the one who bears her own name — gives 'Spent' a sweetness that makes even its cheapest shots feel good-natured. It's hard out there for a lesbian PETA member in rural New England, where a fan of Holly's YouTube channel might approach her outside Home Depot from a truck with a bumper sticker that says, 'MY OTHER CAR IS A GUN.' And it's endearing to see Stuart trying to celebrate the kids' nascent political awareness with a tattoo of a Kropotkin passage that takes up most of his back ('it was the shortest quote I could find'). Bechdel keeps the jokes coming at the pace of a good 'Simpsons' episode, and with the same self-referential reflexes, unnecessary erudition and jokey signage in the background. (The book's own 12 'episodes' borrow their titles from headings in Karl Marx's 'Capital.') 'Spent' is not quite a sequel to Bechdel's long-running domestic-comedy strip, 'Dykes to Watch Out For,' a witty, inclusive contribution to the serial form that flourished in newspaper comics from 'Walt and Skeezix' to 'For Better or for Worse.' But it's not not a sequel, either. Bechdel's earlier mouthpiece, Mo, has been replaced with a fictionalized version of the author herself, but most of the cast — Stuart, Sparrow, J.R., Lois — first appeared in 'D.T.W.O.F.' (Here I feel obligated to reassure you that there's absolutely no need for you to do any homework before reading 'Spent.' It stands on its own.) J.R. was only a toddler when the curtain came down on the strip in 2008; now our old friends have to share their farm-country paradise with 'Covid refugees from Brooklyn' ('Dude, I hate to bring this up, but the goats have been kinda loud,' one says to Alison), and to deal honestly with the fact that they're all, well, aging. If these characters are sad and bewildered by the state of the world, their frustration feels like a reassurance to readers who share it, and perhaps a gentle reminder that it's easy to confuse being socially conscious with being self-serious. But there's also the uncomfortable fact that a black-and-white strip about boomer radicals that ran in alternative newspapers for 25 years has been gentrified into a full-color hardcover published by Mariner, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (In 'Spent,' Alison frets over whether to sell her new book, '$UM,' to Megalopub, a publishing house 'owned by the conservative billionaire family that hit TV show is based on.') If that strikes you as a little suspicious, maybe even hypocritical, well, have both Bechdels got a book for you.
